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Structure Your Team Huddles to Achieve Any Goal [Tips for Entrepreneurs]

Want to achieve any goal in your business? The first thing you need to do is structure your time with your team.

First and foremost, I need to give credit where credit is due. I adapted this “Huddle Waterfall” method from amazing entrepreneur, coach and momentum master Alex Charfen and I use it every single day with my team at Funnelytics.

I use it because it works… and I believe it will work for you, too.

Check it out the method, including a real-life example of how I structured December 2018, right here:

Achieve Any Goal Without “Meetings”

Every single person I have ever known has sat in long, boring meetings where nothing gets done. From talking in circles to mindless wind-bagging, idle gossip to straight up ineffectiveness… you know you’ve been there.

And if you’re like me, you’ve probably tried to come up with a million ways to talk to your team WITHOUT having meetings.

The solution, for me at least, has been in adopting Charfen’s “Targeted Interactions” and Waterfall method.

This means I get together with my team – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly – in a structured way I call the Huddle Waterfall.

Let me break it down for you.

Setting Your Yearly Vision in a Measurable Way

First of all, to achieve any goal in your business you need to identify what your vision is for the next year. A lot of people will do this at the end of the previous year (or the beginning of the new year), but you can do it at any time.

You may be doing this on your own or with your partners, managers or team leaders (or all of the above)…

But the first thing you need to do is sit down and identify what it is you want to achieve in the next year.

Sounds easy, right? Not quite so fast.

In identifying what goals you want to achieve the next year, you need to make sure it includes the following:

  1. It needs to be clearly defined so you can take action on it
  2. It needs to be measurable in a visual way (users, profit, statistics, numbers of some sort)

My personal method of setting a vision for the year is to set a theme. In 2018, my theme for the year was the “Year of Launch”, so all of my goals and my vision was around launching Funnelytics and making it available to the public.

This year, 2019, is the Year of Retention – all of my goals are measurable around retaining my existing customer base, increasing the value of our customers and making sure they love our product and stick around.

Defining your Yearly Vision is the top of your Waterfall… everything trickles down from there, so it’s important that you know exactly what it is you want to achieve.

Once you have your Yearly Vision it is time for your Quarterly Targets.

Defining Your Quarterly Targets

As soon as you have established your Yearly Vision and created measurable goals that define that vision, it’s time to define the first set of Quarterly Targets.

Quarterly Targets answer one question only:

What can we do in the next 90 days that will move the business closer to our Yearly Vision?

You don’t want to be thinking about quarter 2, 3 or 4 yet… you want to sit down with your team and brainstorm every single thing you could do in the next 90 days that will move you closer to your Vision.

Depending on where you are at in your business, you may have a ton of ideas of things you could do, or you may know exactly what it is that you need to achieve in 90 days to push the needle forward. There’s no right or wrong way to do this… you just need to get everything you can think of down on paper.

Then narrow down your brainstorm to the things that are achievable in the next 90 days that will make the most impact on your Yearly Vision.

If you need some help with this, I highly recommend you check out my article on the 80/20 Rule… it can make all the difference when you’re deciding what matters in your business.

And again, only focus on the next three months. Everything after that may change based on what happens in the next 90 days, so at the end of every quarter you will come back together with your team and do this again.

Once you have your Targets for the next 90 days, it’s time to go on to your Monthly Goals.

Monthly Goals, Weekly Commitments and Daily Huddles

Listen, I know that this might seem like a lot of “meetings” right now… but trust me when I say this:

Because you have each step defined and you are setting measurable goals, these “meetings” are not the boring, tedious meetings of the past…

They are targeted interactions that will energize your team and keep you on track, moving toward a common goal.

So on to the next step…

Monthly Goals!

Once you have defined your Quarterly Targets, you need to break them down into what you will achieve in the next 30 days. Again, I would recommend clearly defining the first month only. Then every month you can meet with the appropriate team members to create and adjust your monthly goals. Again, you do this by constantly referring back to your Quarterly Targets and Yearly Vision.

Once you have your Monthly Goals set, you can get together each week to lay out your Weekly Commitments – everything you intend to realistically achieve in a week.

Then every day I recommend you have a very quick, 10-15 minute Daily Huddle with your team to identify the Intentions for the day.

And of course, your Intentions are informed by every step that came before.

So the whole Waterfall looks like this:

  • YEARLY – Measurable Vision
  • QUARTERLY – Targets
  • MONTHLY – Goals
  • WEEKLY – Commitments
  • DAILY – Intentions

And this is how you can achieve any goal in your business!